The Fortress of Glass (9 page)

Of course that assumed there was an after....

Cervoran didn't fight her, but he was barely able to keep his feet under him. She dragged him along. "Yes...," he said. His voice wasn't loud, but it pierced like a bradawl.

They reached the staircase down the north side, opposite where the boy'd lighted the fire which was now waving like a banner over the bier. Ilna was beginning to feel Cervoran's weight in her knees.

Because this was a formal event she wore sandals, which she wouldn't normally do in weather so warm. She caught her left heel stepping down and had to throw her right leg out to keep from pitching onto her face with the former corpse on top of her. Cervoran twisted, trying to help but unable to move his legs quickly enough. It was like carrying a desperately sick man.

They were midway down the middle tier, some twenty feet about the ground, when Ilna felt the pyre collapse with a roar behind them. A column of sparks shot skyward, then mushroomed and rained back.

The pyramid was a stack of hurdles with no internal structure. When the flames ate away the bundled brushwood on the south, the whole thing fell toward the bleachers.

Ilna felt the staircase tilting backward. The stringers were lifting from the ground, threatening to catapult her and Cervoran back into the flames.

Ilna leaped off at an angle, pulling Cervoran along with a strength that'd have surprised anyone who hadn't seen her work a heavy double loom with the regularity of a windmill turning. Her right shoulder brushed the top of the lowest stage. The impact rolled her and her burden so that the late king hit the ground sideways an instant before she did.

There was a shock and a smack like a bundle of wet cloth thrown onto stone. Ilna rolled reflexively and was up again before she knew whether she'd been hurt by the fall.

She hadn't. The pyre was still tumbling into a state of repose, bales of brushwood rolling onto the blazing coals of those that'd ignited earlier. Men were shouting. A soldier tried to grab Ilna, but she slapped his hand away.

The chamberlain and another palace official caught King Cervoran under the arms and began carrying him away from the fire. The fall didn't seem to have hurt him, but that was hard to tell. Cervoran's legs moved as well as they had before. Ilna walked along through eddies of soldiers and a scattering of local civilians, looking for someone she recognized.

"I am...," the late king said shrilly. "I am...."

"Your highness?" said the chamberlain, his own voice rising. "You're King Cervoran."

"I am Cervoran!" the corpse cried. "I am Cervoran!"

"Ilna!" Liane said, catching Ilna's wrists in her hands. Garric's fiancée was usually composed, but her features had a set, frightened look now. "Have you seen Garric? What's happened to Garric?"

* * *

Garric walked onward, certain only that he had to keep moving. He didn't feel his bare feet touch the gravel, but he supposed they must be doing so.

He was walking toward a goal. He didn't know what it was or how far away it was, but he knew he had to go on. His head buzzed and his vision was blurry, and he kept putting one foot in front of the other.

There was a figure beside him. He wasn't sure how long it had accompanied him. He turned to it and tried to speak; his tongue seemed swollen.

"Who are you?" the figure asked. It was a man, but Garric couldn't make out his features or clothing because of the spider web clogging his eyes.

"I'm Garric," he said, forcing the words past his dry lips. "I'm Prince Garric of Haft, Lord of the Isles."

"Prince Garric?" said the other figure. It was leaving him, fading into the hazy shadows the same way it had appeared. "Prince Garric was the last King of the Isles. He and his kingdom have been gone for a thousand years...."

Garric walked. There was light in the distance, but the foggy darkness was close beside and behind him.

Garric took another step forward. The air was chill and humid, suddenly filled with the odors of life and decay. His foot splashed ankle-deep in muck, throwing him forward. His brain was too numb to keep him upright, but at least he managed to get his arms out. He landed on all fours instead of flopping onto his face.

Endless grayness had become fog-shrouded sunlight.

Something hooted mournfully beyond the mist. He couldn't tell how far away it was or even be sure of the direction. The sun was a bright patch in the thick clouds almost directly overhead.

Garric stood carefully. He was stark naked, but so far as he could tell he hadn't been hurt by whatever'd happened. He had a memory of falling into the cloudy heart of the topaz, but he also recalled seeing the diadem bouncing on the ground beside his helmet and tunics. Both those things couldn't be true.

"And maybe neither is, lad," said King Carus. "But we're not on First Atara now, nor anyplace I've been before."

The animal hooted again. It didn't sound especially dangerous, but it was certainly big. Even if it were vegetarian, whatever hunted it would be large enough to be dangerous to an unarmed man....

Garric made a more focused assessment of his surroundings, looking for a weapon. A branch stuck out from a fallen tree. He gripped it with both hands, but it crumbled instead of providing a club.

Trees three or four times Garric's height were scattered over open marsh. The trunks all tapered upward from thick bases, but their foliage varied from needles and fronds to long serpentine whips.

He generally couldn't see more than ten feet in any direction, but swirls and eddies in the mist gave him occasional glimpses out as far as a bowshot. The distant terrain was lowlying and muddy with patches of standing water, more or less identical to the patch on which Garric stood.

It was raining, though it'd taken him a moment to realize that because the air was already so sopping wet. He started to laugh. Aloud, though there was nobody around save the king in his mind, he said, "Well, I've been in worse places, but I won't pretend this is a good one."

"Keep your eyes open, because this is the sort of place that can get worse fast," said Carus. His image grinned in amusement. He and the blue sky above the rose-twined battlements where he stood were all created by Garric's imagination. "There's times I don't mind not having a body any more."

The breeze was from the south. Garric thought he smelled smoke, so he started walking in that direction for lack of a better one. It could've been a fire lighted by lightning, of course; or a meteor.

Or nothing at all; the air was thick with rot and unfamiliar plant odors, so he might be imagining the smell. But smoke would linger in a thick atmosphere like this.

A dozen pairs of small eyes watched him from the edge of the pond he was skirting. When he turned to face them, they disappeared in a swirl and a series of faint plops.

"I never cared for raw fish," said Carus, watching as always through Garric's eyes, "but it's better than starving. Unless peasants-"

He grinned again.

"-know how to build cook fires in a swamp?"

Garric smiled also. "This peasant doesn't," he said.

Thinking about raw fish, he stepped into a grove of a dozen or so stems sprouting from a common base. The trunks ranged from thumb thick to three fingers in breadth. He twisted one in both hands. It was springy and so tough that even his full strength couldn't bend it far out of line.

One of these saplings would make a good spear shaft or fire-hardened spear if he could cut it free. He hadn't seen any exposed rock, even a slab of shale or limestone he could use to bruise through the wood. Maybe there were clams whose shells he could—

A man in a cloth tunic, a cape, and a plaited hat stepped out of the mist on the other side of the grove. He was bearded; a scar ran down the left side of his face from temple to jaw hinge. He carried a spear with a barbed bone tip, and a fine-meshed net was looped around his waist.

"Wah!" the stranger cried. Other men were following him. The nearest carried a club. He stopped, but two spearmen spread out to either side.

Garric felt the king in his mind tense for action. Carus was judging weaknesses and assessing possibilities: grab the spear from Scarface and kick him in the crotch to make him let go of it; stab the man to the left with the spear point, then slam the butt into the face of the man on the right; back away and use the point again on the fellow with the club. Most people don't react quickly enough to instant, murderous violence....

Garric raised his empty right hand, palm forward, and said, "Good day, sirs. I'm glad to meet you."

"If only you had a sword!" King Carus muttered.

If only I had a breechclout, Garric thought.

The strangers halted where they were; the pair on the sides edged closer to their fellows. They began to jabber to one another, punctuating the words by clicking their tongues against the roofs of their mouths. The language was nothing Garric had ever heard before; nor had Carus, judging by his look of stern discomfort.

Garric lowered his right arm and laced his fingers before him, resisting the urge to cover his genitals. Maybe one of the strangers would loan him the short cape they all wore? Though for him to tie it around his waist might be seen as an insult....

Scarface kept his eyes on Garric while he talked to his fellows. He seemed to be the leader, though he was only in his mid-twenties and one of his fellows was easily a decade older.

The discussion ended. Scarface clapped his left palm on the knuckles of the hand holding his spear, then spoke slowly and distinctly to Garric. The other three men watched intently. The words were as meaningless as the rhythmic glunking of a frog.

Garric opened both hands at shoulder height. "I don't understand you," he said, smiling pleasantly, "but I'd like to go with you to your village. Perhaps we can-"

The strangers to either side dropped their spears, then walked forward and grabbed his wrists. One tried to twist Garric's arm behind his back while freeing the length of rope looped over his shoulder.

"Please don't do this!" Garric said, stepping backward to keep the strangers from surrounding him. He continued to smile, but he didn't need his ancestor's instincts to make him tense. He was half a head taller than the biggest of the four; but there were four of them.

The man gripping Garric's right arm snarled something and twisted harder. Garric had fought-and won-his share of wrestling matches in Barca's Hamlet. He let the stranger pull him to the right, then pivoted and lifted the fellow off the ground in a swift arc, using the man on his left as an anchor.

The stranger gave a bleat of fear. Garric let him go at the top of the arc and turned to watch him splash headfirst in the nearby pond. A pair of fingerlings squirted out of the water and danced across the surface for a yard or more on their tails before diving back in. The man who'd been struggling with Garric's left arm backed away showing his teeth.

Garric smiled and raised his hands again. He was breathing hard and he was afraid his expression looked like a wolf's slavering grin, but he was trying to be friendly.

"I'd be pleased to go with you," he said. Obviously the strangers couldn't understand him any better than he could them, but he hoped his quiet tone would make an impression. "But I won't allow you to tie me up. You don't need to do that."

Scarface grimaced and called something to his companions. The older man at his side, standing with his club raised, looked at him in surprise and protested. Scarface repeated the command, this time in a growl.

The man Garric'd thrown into the water stood up, wiping the muck from his forehead with the back of his hand. He glared at Garric, but when Garric looked squarely at him he paused where he was with one foot raised instead of getting out of the pond.

Garric bowed to Scarface, then gestured back in the direction the strangers had appeared from. "Shall we go?" he said.

Scarface guffawed loudly, then broke into a broad grin. He called something to the man standing in the pond. That fellow scowled, but he undid the fishbone pin at his throat and tossed his cape to Garric. The others laughed.

Scarface made a fist with his left hand, then touched the knuckles to Garric's. He gestured southward and turned. Garric clasped the cape around his midriff and walked alongside Scarface, matching his strides to the other's shorter legs.

"Now for a sword," murmured King Carus; but his image was smiling.

* * *

Ilna wasn't impressed by the quality of the tapestries covering the council chamber's walls. Still, they were tapestries instead of wall paintings like she'd found in most of the cities she'd been to. She wondered vaguely who or what the council on First Atara might be, but that didn't matter much.

Ilna stood at the back, moving slowly sideways as she followed the woven patterns more with her soul than with her eyes. At the table in center of the room, members of Garric's court argued about what to do now that the prince had vanished. Everybody had an opinion and every opinion was different, which struck Ilna as absurd. There was only one possible answer to fit the present pattern.

Her face was hard. By virtue of the fact that Ilna os-Kenset was one of Prince Garric's oldest and closest friends, she could state her opinion; which everyone else would listen to politely and as politely ignore. None of these nobles, whether soldiers or civilians, cared what an illiterate peasant thought. Therefore Ilna looked at a marginally competent tapestry while her social superiors nattered pointlessly.